Philippines campaign (1944–1945)

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 13th of April 1945, a team of American soldiers rowed out to Fort Drum, a concrete fortress squatting in Manila Bay. They pumped three thousand gallons of diesel fuel into its walls and set it ablaze. Not one Japanese soldier inside survived the blast. That single, brutal scene sits inside a much larger fight known by several names. It has been called the Philippines campaign, the Battle of the Philippines, the Second Philippines campaign, and the Liberation of the Philippines. Its official codename was Operation Musketeer I, II, and III. American, Filipino, Australian, and Mexican forces spent close to a year expelling an Imperial Japanese occupation that had lasted since the early years of the war. How did commanders who had spent two years leaping across the Pacific decide where to strike first, and at what cost? What became of the Filipino guerrillas who had waited years under occupation for exactly this moment? And why did some Japanese soldiers in the mountains refuse to believe the war was over even after atomic bombs fell on Japan?

• 2. Charting the Advance

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  By mid-1944, American forces sat only 300 nautical miles southeast of Mindanao, close enough to bomb Japanese positions there with long-range bombers. Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz had pushed American forces across the Central Pacific, seizing the Gilbert Islands, much of the Marshalls, and most of the Marianas. Along the way, Nimitz bypassed many Japanese Army garrisons, cutting them off from resupply or reinforcement. Meanwhile, American carrier aircraft were already striking Japanese airfields across the Philippines, targeting both Army and Navy installations.

  General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of the Southwest Pacific theater, had cleared or isolated every Japanese unit on New Guinea and the Admiralty Islands. His northernmost foothold before the Philippines invasion was Morotai in the Dutch East Indies, taken on the 15th to the 16th of September 1944. Morotai was the only base within bomber range of the southern Philippines. Earlier, MacArthur and Admiral William F. Halsey Jr. had isolated the major Japanese base at Rabaul, New Britain, during Operation Cartwheel. Rather than storming Rabaul directly, Allied troops seized lighter-held islands nearby and built airfields to bomb and blockade the garrison into irrelevance.

  Victories in the Marianas campaign, fought on Saipan, Guam, and Tinian from June through August 1944, put American forces within reach of Japan itself. From those islands, B-29 Superfortress bombers of the U.S. Army Air Forces could strike the Japanese home islands, resupplied directly by cargo ship and tanker. Earlier B-29 raids had flown from bases fed by a long supply line through British India and Burma. That route proved too thin to sustain a real bombing campaign. By the fall of 1944, every B-29 had been moved to the Marianas. Even so, Japan's government, army, and navy would not consider surrender, despite knowing the war was already lost.

  Halsey's Fast Carrier Task Force had been pounding Japanese airfields across the Philippines and met surprisingly little resistance from land-based aircraft. On Halsey's recommendation, the Combined Chiefs of Staff, meeting in Canada, moved the first landing north from Mindanao to the central island of Leyte. The change also pushed the invasion date two months earlier than originally planned. The decision meant Leyte, not Mindanao, would be the place where liberation actually began.

• 3. Reluctant Partners

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  Since 1898, the United States and the Philippines had shared a close relationship, formalized in 1935 when the islands became the Commonwealth of the Philippines. Independence had already been promised for mid-1946, a promise many Filipinos still trusted even under occupation. After the defeat of American forces in April 1942, Japanese troops occupied the entire island chain. That occupation was harsh, marked by atrocities and the forced labor of large numbers of Filipinos.

  From mid-1942 through mid-1944, MacArthur and Nimitz kept Filipino guerrilla fighters supplied through U.S. Navy submarine runs and occasional parachute drops. Those guerrillas harassed the Japanese Army and held roughly half of the archipelago, mostly its rural jungle and mountain areas. Loyal to the United States, many Filipinos believed liberation would finally deliver the freedom and independence they had been promised.

  The Australian government offered General MacArthur the use of its First Corps to help retake the Philippines. MacArthur wanted two Australian infantry divisions, each attached to a separate U.S. Army Corps, but Australia's Cabinet balked. Canberra wanted meaningful operational control over its own sector of the Philippines rather than folding its troops into an American corps. No agreement was ever reached. Still, Royal Australian Air Force and Royal Australian Navy units, including a heavy cruiser, took part in the campaign. Mexico's 201st Fighter Squadron flew in support as well.

  MacArthur also kept the Marine Corps out of major ground combat for all ten months of the campaign. The Corps's only contributions were aircraft and aviators covering U.S. Army ground troops. One artillery unit also served: V Amphibious Corps Artillery, led by Brigadier General Thomas E. Bourke. Those 1,500 Marine artillerymen fought only during the Battle of Leyte, between the 21st of October and the 13th of December. It was the Corps's sole ground combat role in the Philippines that year.

  As American divisions closed in, Filipino guerrillas began striking the Japanese openly. They scouted ahead of the advance and fought alongside the regular troops who were about to land.

• 4. Leyte and the Sea Battle

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  On the 20th of October 1944, the U.S. Sixth Army waded ashore on Leyte's eastern coast, backed by heavy naval and air bombardment. Leyte sits in the Visayas island group, northeast of Mindanao, and its shore favored an amphibious landing. Misjudging the strength of American naval and air power, Japan threw most of its remaining Imperial Navy surface strength at the landing force.

  That gamble triggered the Battle of Leyte Gulf, fought from the 23rd to the 26th of October. The U.S. Navy's fast carrier task force, surface fleet, and submarines delivered a decisive win, gutting what remained of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Four Japanese carriers were sunk, though they carried only depleted air squadrons and served mainly as decoys. Numerous battleships and heavy cruisers went down too, along with many light cruisers and destroyers. Crippled, the Imperial Japanese Navy never fought another fleet action for the rest of the war.

  As the Sixth Army pushed inland, Japan rushed reinforcements to Ormoc Bay, on Leyte's western side. The U.S. Fifth Air Force and the 3rd Fleet's Task Force 38 broke up Japan's attempts to land fresh troops and supplies there. They also backed Army ground troops through the Battle of Ormoc Bay, fought from the 11th of November to the 21st of December, 1944.

  Filipino guerrillas kept public order and cleared roads for military traffic once the American beachheads at Tacloban and Dulag were secure. Leyte's guerrilla units answered directly to Sixth Army's corps and divisions, feeding them scouting reports and intelligence. Under Colonel Ruperto Kangleon, fighters dynamited bridges to block Japanese movement, harassed enemy patrols, and sabotaged supply depots. Kangleon's headquarters relayed word of Japanese troop movements straight to Sixth Army.

  Torrential rain and rough terrain slowed but did not stop the American push across Leyte and onto neighboring Samar. On the 7th of December 1944, U.S. troops made another amphibious landing at Ormoc Bay, sealing off Japan's last hope of resupply on Leyte. Fighting dragged on there until the war's end, though most major combat had quieted by early 1945. Sixth Army's next target lay in an island valued less for its beaches than for the airfields it could yield.

• 5. Mindoro's Airfields

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  Mindoro sits directly south of Luzon and Manila Bay, and MacArthur wanted it for one reason: airfields. Those airfields could stretch American air power over Manila, the Philippines's capital and its largest seaport.

  The Seventh Fleet's invasion convoy sailed from Leyte to Mindoro under sustained kamikaze attack, but Japanese aircraft could not delay the landing. Mindoro itself was only lightly held by the Japanese Army, and Filipino guerrillas already controlled much of it, so American troops overran it quickly. Army engineers wasted no time, rapidly building a major air base at San Jose.

  Unlike Leyte, which saw torrential rain most of the year, turning ground to mud and grounding aircraft, Mindoro's dry climate gave American flyers frequent good weather. Mindoro also marked a first for the Pacific War: the debut of USAAF squadrons flying the fast, long-range P-51B Mustang fighter. The island became a major win for the Sixth Army and the Air Forces. It also supplied the launching pad for the next move: an invasion of Luzon at Lingayen Gulf.

  On the 15th of December 1944, American troops landed against minimal resistance on Mindoro's southern beaches, a staging point for the coming Lingayen Gulf operation. Soon after, on the western coast of the island Mindoro had just unlocked, an even larger force would come ashore.

• 6. The Battle for Luzon

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  On the 9th of January 1945, General Krueger's Sixth Army came ashore on the south shore of Lingayen Gulf, on Luzon's western coast. Almost 175,000 men landed along a twenty-mile, or 32 kilometer, beachhead within just a few days. Backed by heavy air support, Army units pushed inland and took Clark Field, forty miles northwest of Manila, in the last week of January.

  Two more landings followed: one to cut off the Bataan Peninsula, and another, which included a parachute drop, to isolate Manila from the south. On the 3rd of February 1945, the U.S. 1st Cavalry Division reached Manila's northern outskirts. Its 8th Cavalry Regiment, fighting as infantry, pushed through the northern suburbs and into the city itself.

  As troops closed on Manila from north and south, the Bataan Peninsula fell quickly. On the 16th of February, paratroopers and amphibious units struck Corregidor at the same time, a fortress island whose guns could seal off Manila Bay's entrance. Securing Manila Bay mattered because the Americans needed a major harbor there to support the invasion of Japan's home islands, then planned for the 1st of November 1945. Corregidor fell on the 27th of February, though pockets of Japanese resistance elsewhere would hold out for months.

  American commanders had expected a quick victory in Manila, but the fighting there dragged on and turned brutal. It took until the 3rd of March to clear the city. Japanese naval infantry fought on and refused to surrender or evacuate as army units elsewhere had already done.

  Once fighting in Manila eased, the newly freed city faced a different threat: its water supply. General Shizuo Yokoyama's Shimbu Group had fortified the Sierra Madre mountains east of the city, holding both the Ipo Dam and the Wawa Dam. Without the Ipo Dam, only a third of the water Manila needed could reach it, a shortfall the XI Corps moved to fix by retaking both dams. What followed was the longest continuous combat engagement in the Southwest Pacific Theater, a seesaw fight from the 28th of February to the 30th of May 1945.

  Sixth Army's XIV Corps first faced the Shimbu Group, before XI Corps took over the fight. Filipino guerrillas under Marcos "Marking" Agustin helped grind the Shimbu Group down over those three months, forcing Yokoyama to retreat deeper into the Sierra Madre. American troops then landed at Infanta, severing the Shimbu Group from the last sizable settlement it still controlled. For the rest of the war, guerrillas combed the Sierra Madre for survivors still hiding or trying to slip north.

  Across the whole island, ten U.S. divisions and five independent regiments fought for Luzon. That made it the largest American campaign of the Pacific war, involving more troops than the United States had committed to North Africa, Italy, or southern France. Even as Luzon's largest battles wound down, smaller islands scattered across the archipelago still waited for their own liberation.

• 7. Retaking the Outer Islands

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  Palawan, the fifth largest and westernmost island in the Philippines, sits between Borneo and Mindoro. On the 28th of February, the Eighth United States Army landed there at Puerto Princesa. Japan mounted little direct defense, but clearing remaining pockets of resistance dragged on until late April. Japanese troops scattered into the mountains and jungles in small units.

  Throughout the islands, Filipino guerrillas helped American forces track down and eliminate Japanese holdouts. The very last of them, Hiroo Onoda, did not surrender until 1974, in the mountains of Lubang Island near Mindoro.

  The Eighth Army's first landing on Mindanao came on the 17th of April, the last of the Philippines's major islands to be retaken. From there, American forces moved on to invade and occupy Panay, Cebu, Negros, and several islands in the Sulu Archipelago. Those islands became bases for the U.S. Fifth and Thirteenth Air Forces to strike targets across the Philippines and the South China Sea.

  By the end of June, Eighth Army troops had pressed Japan's remaining units on Mindanao into a handful of isolated pockets. Similar pockets still held out on Luzon. Fighting in both places continued until Japan's surrender on the 15th of August 1945. That surrender did not end the fighting everywhere at once, and some Japanese units would take far longer to accept that the war was truly over.

• 8. Aftermath and the Reckoning

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  Once Japan surrendered, American authorities took roughly 45,000 Japanese prisoners of war into custody across the Philippines. Those prisoners were held in camps around the country and put to work as labor toward war reparations.

  General MacArthur set up the Philippine War Crimes Commission, while President Sergio Osmeña formed the National War Crimes Office. The two bodies worked together, pursuing war crimes cases both in Tokyo's trials and in the later Philippine War Crimes Trial.

  Some Japanese Army units had lost radio contact with Tokyo by the time of the surrender, and convincing them the war had ended proved difficult. Several held out for months, even years, after the fighting officially stopped. In some cases, senior Japanese officials, including members of the Imperial Family, traveled to the Philippines in person. They came to persuade holdouts that the Emperor himself had ordered the surrender.

  The campaign's toll is measurable in official military tallies. American Army and Army Air Forces losses totaled 13,884 killed and 48,541 wounded, 62,425 casualties in all. Luzon was the deadliest ground for American troops, with 8,310 killed there alone, more than at Leyte or in the central and southern Philippines combined. Japanese losses were far higher: 320,795 killed and 12,573 captured, for a total of 333,368.

  Those figures counted soldiers. It is estimated that a million Filipino civilians died in the campaign that freed their own country.